


Salsa

by BurningTea



Series: Season 11 fic [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abuse of food related metaphor, Cas and Dean learning to understand each other, Castiel in the Bunker, Coda, Episode: s11e03 The Bad Seed, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-23
Updated: 2015-10-23
Packaged: 2018-04-27 18:30:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5059474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningTea/pseuds/BurningTea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After getting Cas physically well, Dean decides to cook a meal. Cas comes to help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salsa

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lizbobjones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbobjones/gifts).



The thud of the chopping board hitting the counter is too loud. Dean’s sure it wasn’t this screamingly silent in the kitchen the last time he cooked in here. Then again, he hadn’t just watched Cas nearly lose himself, hadn’t just survived yet another beating from the guy. Cas wasn’t sitting a few rooms away with what was left of his grace.

He avoids reaching up and rubbing at the swollen reminder on his face, but it doesn’t matter. He can feel it anyway, throbbing with each heartbeat. Cas hasn’t looked at him for more than a few seconds at a time since they left that warehouse. Dean hasn’t looked at Cas much, either. 

In the absence of contact, of conversation, he’s trying cooking. He’ll let the pain and the regret and the failure be smothered by hot food, see if that suffocates the feeling swelling in his gut, the one that’s pushing him to run from whatever force had him staring into Cas’ eyes for so long. 

The onion slices into thin white rings, sharp smelling and translucent, and he welcomes the sting in his eyes. He’s done this before, the wallowing in pain to take the edge off what he feels, but he figures at least this time he’s creating something that will bring comfort. That’s got to be better. Has to be. He can’t look at Cas right now, the memory of the angel’s cheek-bone giving under his knuckles all too fresh, but he can feed him. 

He’s got the meat sizzling in the pan by the time it dawns on him he’s cooking the same kind of food he made for Death. There’ll be some poetic meaning in that, but he’s too tired to bother working out what.

Boots on tile tell him someone’s joined him. Years of living with Sam tell him it must be Cas, but the tread is heavier than it used to be. The footsteps stop partway across the room. Dean lets the weight of this new silence build, settling on his shoulders like a blanket. Finally, when he starts to feel it’s bearing him down, he shrugs his shoulders and speaks.

“Something I can do for you, Cas?”

Fabric rustles, but Cas doesn’t speak. Probably shifting on his feet, looking round the room, shit he didn’t used to do back when he was pure angel, before Dean tainted him. 

“Pretty creepy you just standing there, man,” Dean says, taking a break from chopping and dicing and pressing the heels of his palms against the kitchen worktop. He leans forwards, his shoulders hunching, and tells himself that Cas isn’t a danger. Cas is cured. This isn’t beat-up-Dean round…what would it be now? “You got a reason for being out of your chair?”

“I’m not an invalid, Dean.” Cas sounds irritable. Not that irritable is new for Cas. Still, there’s an edge to it that says Cas isn’t in the mood to be coddled. “The spell is gone. I’ve spent enough time sitting around. I want to do something useful.”

“Useful?” Dean closes his eyes, tilts his head to ease a kink in his neck. “I’m cooking Mexican food, Cas. It’s a bit below your pay grade.”

“I don’t get paid.”

Dean is never sure if Cas is joking when he says things like that. 

“Well, you should,” Dean says, even though he didn’t line those words up with any logical part of his brain. “The crap you’ve put up with, the shit you’ve had to do, you deserve some sort of payment.”

When Cas doesn’t answer, Dean opens his eyes and turns around. Cas is looking at the ingredients set out ready to be used, his gaze assessing. 

“You think I’m doing it wrong?” Dean asks. 

He means it as a joke. Cas winces. 

“No. No, of course not. You know what you’re doing. I…I’ll go and find-”

“No.” The thought of Cas walking away strikes at something in Dean. “No, you, er, you said something about salsa earlier, right? You think you can make some? You gotta chop up those tomatoes for a start.”

This time, the silence is more pointed, and Dean risks a proper look at Cas to see his eyes narrowed.

“I’m sure I can adapt what I know of slicing up angels,” Cas says, his tone flat. 

Fuck, Dean needs to get back into the rhythm of when Cas is being serious, when he’s genuinely pissed. The cloud of demon smoke in his mind has cleared, but for too long it cloaked his view of Cas, made it harder to read the guy or to follow the thread of their conversations, and it feels like a skill he’s lost. Maybe it’s just rusty. 

“Yeah, that’ll be a bit of a shift,” Dean says, and gets Cas a knife from the drawer.

They work in silence, Cas grumbling more or less to himself about a time when spices didn’t come in packets and vegetables were coated in dirt rather than plastic. Dean calls him an old-timer and weathers the glare. It’s not like he misses the irony. His own joints ache and the sore feeling in his lower back settled in within moments of the Mark being gone and hasn’t budged since. Still, Cas has taken to making comments about being very old, about the present day being billions of years from the beginning. Perhaps it’s to reassure himself he’s an angel at a time when he feels it’s slipping away from him.

The thought is a stone too many in the wall Dean’s piled up between himself and his thing with Cas, and he feels the whole structure tremble. 

“You glad you don’t feel like a tomato anymore?” he asks, because he has to say something.

Cas grunts. Dean glances over to see him staring at the blender with his arms crossed. He hasn’t turned it on. 

“Button’s just there, Cas.”

“Yes.”

“You gotta press it.”

He gets a scowl for his trouble before Cas’ gaze slides back to the unmoving blender. At this rate, Dean’ll have a full meal ready before Cas can produce salsa. Stepping over to Cas, Dean peers at the machine over the guy’s shoulder.

“It’s not gonna blend itself,” Dean says.

“We never feel we’re putting ourselves in the blender,” Cas mutters, as though he hasn’t heard Dean, or maybe he thinks this is an appropriate response to Dean’s comment, “but perhaps it’s always our choice. Perhaps we just keep dropping ourselves in and letting something press the button. Did these tomatoes choose to become salsa?”

“No?” Dean says, hoping it’s the answer Cas wants. 

He’s even less sure whether Cas is joking when it comes to these odd little philosophical rants, but they sometimes seem to bring Cas a kind of peace, and Dean’s loathe to dampen that right now. 

“No,” Cas agrees. “Yet here they are, one press of the button away from being annihilated. And they’ll never be able to be just tomatoes again.”

This is shaping up to be one of the heavier conversations Cas has dragged Dean into via metaphor. He just catches himself before he rubs a hand over his face. 

“Yeah, but it’s not like salsa’s all that bad. A tomato, it doesn’t have all the flavour, the complexity, you know? It doesn’t go as well with the whole spread I’ve got going on here.”

Cas tilts his head a fraction of an inch, but he doesn’t say anything. His eyes are pensive. 

“Come on, Cas,” Dean tries, lifting a hand and dropping it onto Cas’ shoulder. The angel sways slightly, something he never used to do. “You want salsa or not? The tomatoes are chopped up now. They’re not doing any good if you just leave them.”

At that, Cas turns his head and almost, almost, looks at Dean. His tone is thoughtful, a shade less despondent.

“You’re suggesting when one form is damaged, destroyed, you should move forward? Become something new? Something useful?”

“Well, yeah.” Dean’s aware his hand is still on Cas’ shoulder. He can feel Cas’ warmth radiating up into the pads of his fingers, the meat of his palm. He makes no move to pull his hand away. “With bits of tomato you have a ruined tomato. With salsa, you have a tasty addition to a meal.”

“A tasty addition.” Cas sounds out the words, looks to be considering them. “That makes sense, I suppose.”

Without further comment, he reaches out and presses the button. The blender kicks into gear, whirling the ingredients, chopped up tomatoes included, into movement. Cas watches as though he’s overseeing the creation of a new species.

“Hey, that’s long enough,” Dean says, and he strokes his hand up and down Cas’ shoulder. 

When the blender stops, Cas finally turns to meet Dean’s eyes. The shock of it is ridiculous. Dean should be used to this by now, but all those months without really seeing Cas, without really looking at him, have lowered his tolerance. He feels the tug as Cas stares at him.

“See?” Dean says. “Just took a few seconds and now we’re good to go.”

“Yes. Change can be very quick. And you never really know when some permanent change will come.”

“No,” Dean says. “You don’t.” And he knows they’ve dropped whatever was going on with that tomato metaphor. He shifts, tugging slightly at Cas until the guy turns to face Dean properly, and sets his other hand on Cas’ right shoulder. Bracketed by Dean’s hands, Cas looks solid, present. “No, we hardly ever know. But it can be good, right?”

“Yes,” Cas says, and now he sounds uncertain, as though Dean’s the one who’s suddenly lost him with a random analogy. 

“I mean it,” Dean says. 

He hesitates a moment, but he’s already holding onto Cas and pulling back, pretending he didn’t cup Cas’ face just hours ago…well, once the chopping’s been done, you have to make something or chuck it all in the trash. He moves his right hand up, his thumb brushing over Cas’ cheek, and curves his palm around the side of Cas’ head. Cas stares back at him as though Dean isn’t doing anything unusual. Maybe, to him, this isn’t weird. Maybe he doesn’t get what it means. 

Then Cas lifts his own hand, his gaze shifting to Dean’s mouth. Dean lets his lips part as Cas reaches up, and he can’t help inhaling as Cas touches his index finger to Dean’s lower lip. They stand still, no whirling or chopping or moving, but Dean feels the moment click like someone’s pressed that button.

“Cas…” he says: breathes, really.

“Be quiet, Dean,” Cas says.

When Cas steps closer, tilting his head up, his fingers trailing down to stroke Dean’s jaw, Dean is sure he isn’t processing this. Cas isn’t bunching the fabric of Dean’s shirt up in his other hand, isn’t pressing his lips to Dean’s. They aren’t doing this.

Except they are.

All too soon, Cas pulls back, something like concern drifting into his eyes. He looks almost like he did in that warehouse, shaken and intense, dazed. 

“Well?” Cas asks.

Dean’s brain kicks back into gear, and he drops his hands to Cas’ waist, ready to pull him back in. You can’t go back, after all. He lets the smirk blossom on his face.

“And what do you know? I was right.” He chuckles at Cas’ confused look and can’t resist adding. “I’ve ended up with something tasty.”

**Author's Note:**

> Not sure if this is borderline, or full-on, crack. Let me know!
> 
> Oh, and come say hi on tumblr. I'm [humanformdragon](http://humanformdragon.tumblr.com/).
> 
> [ExpatGirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ExpatGirl/pseuds/ExpatGirl) and I are exchanging ghost stories for Christmas, reviving a fine old Christmas tradition. They will be Destiel reworkings of ghost stories which will post on Christmas Eve. We'd love to have some other people join in. Any takers?
> 
> If so, it's Destiel, a ghost story based on a classic ghost tale/novel and it's a minimum of 3,000 words (but can go over if you want, of course)
> 
> I've set up a collection for [Ghost Stories](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/GhostOfChristmasDestiel). We're going to post on Christmas Eve and bring back a fine old tradition, but with hunter/angel love. Check it out if you're interested.


End file.
